Holiday Ornament Design Challenge

Over the Holiday break, I challenged my family to design some ornaments for our tree. So far, only Mason (17 year old son) rose to the challenge, and I think he did very well indeed.

He did the designs in OpenSCAD, and at first hardcoded all the measurements until I encouraged him to make the designs fully parametric. This piece was designed to accept a light (from the string lights on the tree) in the bottom. Printed in Natural PLA with about 15% fill, giving it a kindof stripey, plaid texture.

This was printed without support on the Ultimaker 3. The very inside top is a little stringy, but hardly noticeable, and very easy to clean up.

The second design was really the first one he did, and isn’t fully parametric. You’ll have to scale it in your slicer, but it turned out pretty nice.

I printed it in white, thinking it might be fun to use a sharpie to color in the facets. This was printed with the PVA support.
I also printed it in transparent ColorFabb XT. I had a problem with the wipe tower, so the top was a bit messed up with mixed PVA and XT, which broke off, but a light fit into it, and I think it looks nice.

I encourage you to sit down and design with your family this holiday. You can get the sources for these at: http://github.com/osbock/HolidayOrnaments. Feel free to do some Pull requests to add your own designs!

For younger, or less mathematically inclined designers, I recommend Tinkercad.com, or I’m sure there are cool Ipad apps out there. Let me know if you have a favorite!